A free/libre, cross-platform, SP, open world, open-ended, space adventure game inspired by "Frontier: Elite II", whose environment is our galaxy in the 31st century, with millions of star systems to explore. The player can land on the planets, slingshot past gas giants, and burn when flying between binary star systems. He can choose to be a peaceful adventurer, a pirate, a bounty hunter or a mining operator, and performing all kinds of missions for various factions. Its a high quality game developed by an army of talented people since 2009.

Description [en]

Pioneer is a space adventure game set in our galaxy at the turn of the 31st century.

The game is open-ended, and you are free to eke out whatever kind of space-faring existence you can think of. Look for fame or fortune by exploring the millions of star systems. Turn to a life of crime as a pirate, smuggler or bounty hunter. Forge and break alliances with the various factions fighting for power, freedom or self-determination. The universe is whatever you make of it.

Pioneer is under constant development and has a friendly community of players, modders and developers around it. We release a new version every month. We'd love for you to try it and make part of the galaxy your own!

Wikipedia:

Pioneer is a free and open source space trading and combat simulator video game inspired by the commercial proprietary Frontier: Elite 2. It is available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

Setting

Pioneer is set at the start of the 31st century. The player may choose from one of three starting locations: Earth, New Hope or a space station around Barnard's Star.

Gameplay

The game has no set objective, and the player is free to explore the galaxy and accrue money by performing tasks like trading, piracy or combat missions, allowing them to achieve a higher rank, buy better ships and equipment and hire more crew.

It has a realistic flight and orbital model based on Newtonian physics and a rudimentary atmospheric model with drag and heat build-up.

Development

Development was started in 2008 by Tom Morton, also known for his work on GLFrontier, as remake and homage to Frontier: Elite 2. The game is written in C++ and uses OpenGL for graphical rendering. It uses Lua for scripting support. The development migrated in 2011 to a Sourceforge.net repository, and some years later to GitHub (downloads are still distributed from Sourceforge).

The project had at times up to 50 developers and is of 2017 under continued, active development.

Reception and impact

Pioneer was selected in March 2013 as "HotPick" by Linux Format. Pioneer was used in a physical spaceship flight simulator project in 2013. In 2014 Pioneer was described by PCGamer as "incredibly slick" and named among the "Ten top fan remade classics you can play for free right now". In 2015 a Der Standard article noted the enormous work the fans have achieved with Pioneer as Elite remake and continuation.

Pioneer became a quite popular open source freeware title; the games was downloaded between 2011 and May 2017 alone via Sourceforge.net over 230,000 times.